To some extent, I think we could use some redrawing of the borders and reallocation of the states to better map to actual metro regions and group areas that have common interests together. It'd be a bit ticklish to get right, and leave everything functional, but there are some wicked schisms between areas of our historical states, and other places that are spliced up into multiple states that probably should be joined together.. It'll never happen, but it's a fun thought experiment.
I don't think things are going to get better on this front by themselves, as the economy seems to be centralizing more and more, such that even the second and third rate regional cities are hollowed out and population and money clusters ever tighter. It's already evident that the urban areas can throw their weight around and vote in pretty much whatever they want in a lot of places, and the rest of the state has to mobilize completely to defeat them. I'm from Maine originally, and it's been a constant battle lately to keep the Portland metro area from passing ballot initiatives that make sense in their little neck of the woods, but are insane when you get off the I-95 corridor.
> I'm from Maine originally, and it's been a constant battle lately to keep the Portland metro area from passing ballot initiatives that make sense in their little neck of the woods, but are insane when you get off the I-95 corridor.
I'm also from Maine, and this is true. And I agree that some redrawing is necessary, because the reason things work as you describe in Maine is tha the Portland metro area is almost half the state's poptulation. They kinda should get what they want if we're talking about this like it's a democracy. As you note, dividing things up and creating new levels of administration to better reflect this would be a real problem--'cause now Maine-minus-Portland opens their wallet and a couple flies fly out.
(I'm on the "federalism is broken" bandwagon, though, so, eh. I dunno.)
The best answer is to decentralize and devolve power as much as feasible. That way, everybody can go their own way as much as possible. Of course some people/groups don't like that and want to impose their way of doing things everywhere.
All groups do that. Even you're doing that with your comment right here. "Everybody should do X." That's what humans do with our shared moral languages. It is inevitable.
But you probably think it's different when you're proposing a decentralization rule like this, because it is about empowering people, not oppressing people. Of course, you'll empower people who want to oppress people, but you'll have shirked any responsibility for actual consequences, so it's all ok, isn't it? You're not advocating for your country to be divided and conquered, just divided. So you won't be responsible for the inevitable conquering that occurs afterward.
You have solved the problem of personal responsibility, but social responsibility still exists, and you haven't proposed anything to manage it.
Asking that power be decentralized as feasible with more local levels and ultimately the individual as the default repository may be a moral exhortation like a call to communism in semantic sense but the end result if successful certainly wouldn't be the same.
I'm not asking for anarchy so we can still have our roads and bridges but for stuff like forced SSM cake baking I think we can take a page out of the prog playbook when they were arguing against the Religious Right and say that morality, beyond whats necessary for basic stability should be a private affair, and not actively managed and instilled by the State.
Different people have different values, and one person's tolerance is another's oppression. (The more authoritarian sides of the Left and Right each see opponents as "too tolerant" of different things.)
Recent studies have suggested that there may be some fundamental cognitive factors that control political alignment. They may even be genetic. If this turns out to be true, are you still OK with forcing the other side to live by your "correct" rules? Isn't that just tribalism and conquest?
Just because people have different values does not mean we don't share values, and more importantly, that we don't share reality. The things that I am intolerant toward are a disregard for the facts, a disregard for demonstrated relevance, and a disregard for the legitimacy of expertise and aggregate authority.
>Isn't that just tribalism and conquest?
I mean, if you're saying that this conflict is an integral part of human nature, then you're not asking me to change my mind; you're giving me a justification for why I don't have to. That knife cuts both ways.
This is always the problem I have when trying to reason about American conservatism; if God gave you your riches, then if you lose them, attribute it to God. If might makes right, then I am not wrong to deny it so long as that denial leads to victory. Etc.. There's nothing there to tell me I'm wrong, only that people disagree. So wrongness has to be a kind of aggregate disagreement, and that leads to liberalism. Both roads lead to liberalism.
> Just because people have different values does not mean we don't share values, and more importantly, that we don't share reality. The things that I am intolerant toward are a disregard for the facts, a disregard for demonstrated relevance, and a disregard for the legitimacy of expertise and aggregate authority.
We may share the same physical reality, but many facets of reality that are critical to human experience may not be shared. In particular, and I am aware that this contradicts what you've just said, values seem to be very different across cultural boundaries. There are some general shared values that are often shared across cultures, but these shared values are also not the values that people care most about on a day-to-day basis. (Not too many people out there protesting murder, theft, etc in any organized sense.)
The values that people seem to care most about are the ones that distinguish them from other tribes. These values are often more important to people than basic needs. People will starve themselves over values, they will kill themselves over values. You can say they shouldn't. Obviously they disagree!
> I mean, if you're saying that this conflict is an integral part of human nature, then you're not asking me to change my mind; you're giving me a justification for why I don't have to.
It is an integral part of human nature. I'm not sure it can be "solved" without creating a truly oppressive superstate and permanently reducing human genetic diversity. Conflict is inherent to being alive; the best you can do is keep it on a slow boil.
You keep framing this conflict as though it is a purely political/value-based disagreement. It is not. When somebody denies basic facts about the world or the validity of rational methods and/or scientific reasoning, you are not simply disagreeing with me in a political sense, you are advocating for a world that is entirely arbitrary. This is what I'm saying is the double-edged knife: at best, if such people get their way, they have only provided others the justification to be cruel to them. They have not provided any argument that their opponents are wrong.
I don't deny anybody their experiences. If you trust someone who swears upon a bible, I will tell you that you are gullible, and point out that this activity neither aids in the service of justice nor pays due consideration to our mutual respect for freedom of religion. But if you say "homosexuality is a choice", you are marginalizing people's fundamental perceptions. This is not merely a difference in values, it is deception and oppression that supports one's arbitrary values, and if anyone else did the same thing, they'd be in a position to oppress and marginalize just the same.
This conflict is not simply about political disagreement -- it is about the denial of the validity of basic reasoning methods solely on the basis that the outcome is personally inconvenient.
> You keep framing this conflict as though it is a purely political/value-based disagreement. It is not. When somebody denies basic facts about the world or the validity of rational methods and/or scientific reasoning, you are not simply disagreeing with me in a political sense, you are advocating for a world that is entirely arbitrary.
Isn't that a position based on its own set of values, though? And your position would clearly be based on a different set of values.
> I don't deny anybody their experiences. If you trust someone who swears upon a bible, I will tell you that you are gullible, and point out that this activity neither aids in the service of justice nor pays due consideration to our mutual respect for freedom of religion.
Followed immediately by
> But if you say "homosexuality is a choice", you are marginalizing people's fundamental perceptions.
[Emphasis added]
Look, there's nothing wrong with having values and staking out a firm position based on those values. Claiming that one's own values-based position is distinct and special and is fundamentally different than other values-based positions, however, is merely dogma.
And if everything is dogma, then we must simply fight to the death. I am arguing it is not, precisely because that is not the outcome I want to occur. You can disagree -- but you do not improve anything by doing so.
As I've been saying, if you argue that our positions are merely equal, you do not change my mind, you simply cause me to stop trying to justify my position. (You've justified it for me!) That is unacceptable, and betrays the entire reason we're talking about this.
> And if everything is dogma, then we must simply fight to the death.
Only if everyone feels they have to "win".
It is possible to force a draw or stalemate, in perpetuity. That's what I'm arguing for. The only alternative is to force your opponents to comply, globally, through overwhelming oppression.
I've seen some studies that indicate this is less about regions and more about exposure to high population densities and everything that goes with it, though I can't find the links now.
I've heard the same, and Ezra Klein recently had on an interesting guest, Will Wilkinson from the Niskanen Center, who discussed political sorting and population density in some detail.
I think its a mix between exposure and affinity. People migrate to what they like or want to take advantage of then their mindset is reinforced by like minded people and conditions.
I think you could generalize that to "population density", since there are reasons people in low-density areas think the way they do, just the same as there are reasons for people in high-density ares to think like they do.
> In most European democracies, geography doesn’t matter in the same way. Legislators are elected from larger districts, each with multiple representatives, granting parties proportional power. If a party wins 50 percent of the votes, it doesn’t matter much if those votes are evenly spread around or tightly clustered.
Comparisons with European democracies strike me as counterproductive; the US is a federal republic, whereas most European democracies are unitary states.
I'd be interested in an analysis that compares the urban-rural divide in the US with that of the EU, which are both similarly large, similarly heterogenous, similarly Federal in nature, and (perhaps most importantly) have similar structures of government.
The US's Senate looks less like the upper houses of most European democracies, and a lot more like the EU's Council of the European Union[1], which is the upper house of their (essentially) bicameral legislature. Like the Senate, it grants equal representation to its states.
I'd also be interested in an analysis that compares the US with Switzerland, whose structure similarly favors decentralization. The Swiss Council of States[2] distributes its seats by state (canton), rather than by population.
Not to mention theres still a huge rural conservative/urban liberal divide in Europe. Its practically every where you look in the world and reaches back to at least the French Revolution.
While the majority of countries in the European Union are not federation of states, there is several that have exactly that structure: Austria, Belgium, Germany, Denmark, Finland, France and the Netherlands. Austria, Germany, Finland and France being republics, the other ones with a (ceremonial) monarch as head of state.
Sure, and the majority of States in the US are themselves federations of yet smaller administrative subdivisions. 49 out of 50 US States have bicameral legislatures.
The point still stands, the US looks less like Austria or Germany or Denmark, and more like the EU, as a whole.
Bicameral legislatures don't imply federalism. In my state and the ones around me, the upper house members don't represent counties, just slightly larger districts than the lower house.
You're right, my point was more that there exists some states that look like Austria/Germany, and some states that look like Denmark. The existence of a bicameral legislature was more a reference to the self-governing nature of the states (which have executive branches, constitutions, and judiciaries).
Which is all to say: the US is more similar to the EU than it is to any one of its individual member states.
It’s still quite different. In the Bundesrat for example, more populous states have more votes. And unlike in the US, all legislation does not require involvement of the Bundesrat.
"Rural sprawl" from a century or two ago is biting back. Much of the growth of the US was driven by agriculture. The early version of the American dream was finding cheap land and farming it. That filled much of a continent. Small rural towns were built to support farmers nearby. Larger towns and cities supported small towns.
Today US employment in agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting is only 1.5% of the US workforce.[1] That's all. A century ago it was around 50%. A profitable farm today is a lot of land, a lot of machinery, and very few people. The small towns and small cities built to support farming still exist on the ground. But there are not enough farmers to support them. Which is why they are dying.
Plus, of course, the remaining farmers use Wal-Mart, Amazon, UPS, and the Internet to get many of the things they need. Much less need to drive into town. Which is probably half boarded up anyway.
Much of the regression from agricultural professions happened in the early 20th century, due to automation from the combustion engine. The phenomenon talked about in this article is much more recent, and more likely due to rural areas being susceptible to polarization after not recovering after the recession.
One side wanted a more agrarian nation with hard manual labor (The Protestant work ethic)to prove self worth, while the other side wanted a more industrial nation with all the automation and efficiency that went with it, which in turn fueled the arts and sciences.
There may be some overlap, but these divisions are nearly as old as the nation itself.
I was talking with a coworker from India at lunch about 7 years ago. He talked about the extreme urban/rural divide in his country - to the point that movies were made for different audiences - and asked about it here in the US. I said how rural communities tended to be more conservative and urban ones more liberal, but in terms of mass-media and entertainment none of those differences appeared to be very significant.
Either I was naive or I broke the universe, because ever since then it seems like everything wants to prove me wrong on this point. I browse headlines from many publications, and I can often see a divide between what is being covered. Just today I read that PBS had a "Arthur" episode with a gay marriage and Alabama isn't airing it.
I live on the edge of the divide, and there are differences, but everyone farther out from the city than me still sees the Avengers just like everyone in the city does. The rednecks driving jacked up trucks are just as likely to listen to rap as they are to country. If you stop at a red light in the city on a nice day, you're still likely to hear someone singing about pickup trucks and beer from the car next to you. And 95+% of Americans bought something from Walmart last year.
I remember visiting relatives on the other side of the country in Burbank as a kid, and if anything the culture is far more homogeneous than it was then.
While I do agree there are differences between urban and rural voters, this analysis is still ignorant of quite a bit of subtlety due to the simplistic red vs blue framing. The article does try to address this slightly, but they fail to explain the fact that rural Democrats voted for Bernie Sanders in the primary and urban voters for Hillary. This two axis red vs blue kind of thinking puts a large amount of rural America in this theoretical "center". This misunderstanding is what results in centrist Democrats in these places not getting votes. The answer isn't shifting the "center" further right or distancing from AOC.
I can understand why someone who watches Fox News, and/or listens to a lot of Ben Shapiro / Lauren Southern / Charlie Kirk / Candace Owens, and/or is subbed to r/The_Donald might believe this. (Sorry if I'm being presumptuous) These sources push the narratives that "The Left" is trapped inside of their own radicalizing echo chamber, but don't go far enough to acknowledge that "The Right" is not immune to that problem either. What's dominating US political discoure is the bases of both sides focusing their outrage on a small percentage of the other. Both sides say that the other is becoming more radical every day. When it comes to the Democrats, however, the vast majority of candidates vying for the nomination are really the "centrist" (translation: "swampy") types.
People vote their wallets, and we have two very different economies in America currently.
We are in a period of history with a lot of similarities to the gilded age, and one of the big issues of that time was "Free Silver": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_silver. Back then, there was desire by the mostly-rural side to allow a silver-based monetary standard. This would effectively increase inflation.
Today, we see significant inflation disparities between the big coastal cities like NY and SF and the rest of the country. Essentially, the fed rate is too low to have low inflation in the cities and too high for economic growth in the rest of the country. This becomes a self-reinforcing effect, as the relative cost of borrowing is lower in the cities. So, the city and the country are just not going to agree about what to do economically.
Your last paragraph is very similar to what I've read is going on in the European Union with the Euro. (I don't remember what book I read it in)
Basically their argument was that it works in America because the federal government is strong enough to redistribute wealth to places that can't keep up. In Europe the federal government is weak, so the southern countries have an economy they can't keep up with.
I don't remember the specifics, but that was the gist of it.
I've read that another problem is that unlike in the US with its relative cultural homogeneity, people in Europe are less willing to move where jobs are. The result is less efficient population distribution. EDIT: fixed typo.
In the US that ability to move where the jobs are is creating a concentration of prosperity in certain cities. Often those with above average skills are able to move, leaving the others behind.
This leads to overcrowding in cities like NY and SF. Layer in economies of scale, increased competition, and better talent pools, and it becomes increasingly difficult for other areas to compete. Creates a kind of feedback loop which increases the geographical wealth disparity.
The only thing that seems to balance that is the increase in cost-of-living in those areas.
This may have been where lacking a central bank could have helped us. One of the advantages of America is that the feds are only supposed to do a few things, so states can pick what works best for them. We've been joking about the "California Dollar" for years; maybe it should be separate? Just throwing out ideas. I know there would be consequences, but the proposition is not entirely without merit.
I figure that there has to be a way to arbitrage the inflation difference. If there actually were "California Dollars" and "Arkansas Dollars", then you could easily arbitrage the difference between the inflation differential and the change in their rate of exchange (which is currently set to zero by fiat). I've thought about using inflation swaps, but that ends up looking more like a carry trade than an arbitrage, and would require lots of invested capital to get good returns. An arbitrage trade between the two inflationary regions should be more scaleable.
If anyone has any ideas, I'd be happy to discuss them via email (see profile).
The American urban-rural divide in the US maps pretty neatly to who is dependent on AM radio for information. US AM radio is a cesspit of disinformation operated by extreme-right-wing billionaires who have found it is remarkably cheap to manage populations, and get them to vote for benefits to billionaires at the direct expense of those voters.
This was the fond dream of Edward Bernays, inventor of modern PR and propaganda. (One of his early successful campaigns got women addicted to tobacco.) He worried deeply about democracy's ability to decentralize power, and strip it from elites, so he set out to invent a way to subvert it. He was immensely proud of inspiring Josef Goebbels's work to drum up enthusiasm for Hitler's project.
Rural voters are the most valuable target for disinformation campaigns because, by a historical quirk in American electoral politics, their votes count for quite a lot more than urban voters', and because they are more isolated from one another and so easier to keep on track. Urban voters have easier direct, face-to-face contact with one another that makes lies more expensive to sell.
Rural voters vote in their interest, which is more closely aligned to the Republican party.
Both parties appease their billion dollar donors and both take part in propaganda.
The Democratic Party is not a party of saints, in many cases they can be worse. Both have their flaws, but at the end of the day you have to choose between the two.
Close, but not quite. This is "Those people are too propagandized to know what's good for them, so we should decide for them what their sources of information should be."
Recently there was a story on NPR interviewing high school classmates of the guy who now calls himself Alex Jones, who knew him as a bully (who beat one so badly he still suffers) and huge liar, but had not connected the thug they knew to the Alex Jones they followed on the radio. You could hear their difficulty reconciling the two.
Putting words in others' mouths is a cheap, dishonest rhetorical trick, and I didn't mean to be doing so. But...
> The American urban-rural divide in the US maps pretty neatly to who is dependent on AM radio for information. US AM radio is a cesspit of disinformation operated by extreme-right-wing billionaires who have found it is remarkably cheap to manage populations, and get them to vote for benefits to billionaires at the direct expense of those voters.
Your words.
> Rural voters are the most valuable target for disinformation campaigns because, by a historical quirk in American electoral politics, their votes count for quite a lot more than urban voters', and because they are more isolated from one another and so easier to keep on track. Urban voters have easier direct, face-to-face contact with one another that makes lies more expensive to sell.
Also your words.
> Rural voters used to vote their interests. Now they vote against their own interests, and for billionaires'.
Also your words.
> Those people are so heavily propagandized at that they now believe and repeat falsehoods.
Also your words.
So, no, you don't call for a Ministry of Truth. But you complain that rural America is being fed lies, which is leads them into voting against their own interest. Therefore... what? Shake your head at their stupidity and leave them there? Or are you going to propose something to help them?
And if you're going to help them, if your analysis of the problem is correct, then you have to stop them from listening to the propaganda somehow. How are you going to do that, since they have now reached the point where they listen to it willingly?
This is what I think the logic of your position forces you to. (Feel free to point out where you diverge from what I expect.)
We did used to have FCC rules that largely prevented the problem without any Ministry of Truth, but the rules were abandoned because billionaires found them inconvenient.
The Fairness Doctrine? That might do it. If people who only get their information from one source get both sides from that source, that might help.
But I suspect that these days, there'd be just a caricature/strawman of the other side, not an honest presentation, and therefore it wouldn't actually help. (And I don't just mean Fox would do it. I could see CNN doing the same, just less blatantly.)
And, those who only want to hear one side can get their "news" online these days. So I don't think it would work. It might help, though.
> the old "those people are too stupid to know what's good for them, so we should decide for them."
No. Those people are so heavily propagandized at that they now believe and repeat falsehoods. A clear majority of rural "conservative" voters profess belief Obama is Muslim, that he is not a US citizen, that illegal immigration has a detectable impact on their livelihoods (vs., e.g., H1 programs), that Trump was ever good at running businesses, or that his campaign was unfairly investigated for corruption... I could go on all day.
My guess is that if you're on hacker news that there's a good chance you are making significantly above the median income. There is an implicit "poor" in the OP's statement, so it should really read "poor rural voters".
As to poor rural voters voting against their interest, Medicaid expansion is a good example--studies show that lack of healthcare access directly contributes to a higher death rate among poor white voters. And in my state it's estimated that the state will spend more money on hospital subsidies for the poor than they would have if they had accepted the deal for the Federal government to pay for 90% of the cost of Medicaid expansion.
I'm not sure there was any implication of "poor" by the OP. It seems you added that to drum up validation for your following healthcare argument.
Rural does not equal poor. Most people I know around here have healthcare through their employer and are against more government involvement. They just want to keep their current plan and doctor.
I vote Republican because of economic and defense issues. I do lean more liberal when it comes to social issues. Libertarian if you have to put a label on it. Basically the government should just be for defense and limited regulation. States should handle the rest. Liberals always try to blanket the country in their policies.
It's sad to see Californians flock to Texas to avoid the taxes they voted for.
Republican policies may not help the poor, but Democrat policies create the poor.
I see that you have forgotten on whose watch the Great Recession started, and on whose it ended.
I see that you have forgotten who was responsible for the invasion of Iraq, which has now cost over 5 trillion dollars, and was justified with out-and-out fraud.
So, on both economic and defense grounds, you vote against your own interest.
I guess my area...(the 2nd biggest AM market in the country) didn't get the memo. ClearChannel or whatever its called now, not exactly a bit player, broke up a popular block of syndicated rightwing programming in favor of a slew of crappy local shows. I'm not sure the move was entirely financially motivated, my gut feeling is that this didn't help improve the numbers. Beforehand they'd been constantly trying and failing to insert in leftwing hosts. And they're now heavily advertising starting up a entire LGBT focused station, that nobody was exactly clamoring for.
Wild, I didn't know that there were actually any people that listened to AM radio still. The bare handful of times I've accidentally gotten switched onto that band in my car, it's been nothing but static and Red Sox broadcasts.
Call me a big city liberal but in my view small states have way too much power and Congressional reform is needed to balance it out. If demographics stay on trend eventually we'll have something like 70% of Senate seats going to 30% of the population. The arbitrary limit of 435 House of Representative seats is not enough to accurately model the population growth of this country and ensure that the ratio of representative : constituent is feasible. We cannot keep operating on a constitution built for a completely different country and expect to grow with the challenges of the 21st century.
Or we need to split up the US into blocks that have less divergent values. The urban rural divide within Maryland is present but manageable. The divide between urban Maryland and rural Alabama is unmanageable.
What will stop rural Alabama from devolving into a third word country? Or do you still expect the successful urban blocks to pay for the backwaters blocks, but now without any input into their political structure?
It's a problem because states like Alabama were very important in the 2016 Presidential election.
The US government system wasn't designed with the idea that large swaths of the population aren't just in favor of limited government, they're largely cynical of the entire concept of government altogether.
The current state of politics in the deep south largely depends upon the continued suffering of its residents. Politicians then direct the anger generated by that suffering at the Federal Government, and look at how that played out in 2016.
Right, but I'm assuming under the redistricting proposed they would have less political effect on the Federal Government. If their influence on the whole country is reduced, they are free to run their State or "Block" however they choose.
The evidence I’m aware of more strongly supports the theory that it’s the liberal coastal cities that are devolving to third-world conditions. Los Angeles is turning into a disease-ridden rat-infested trash heap[1] and San Francisco’s sanitary problems are also well known. I’d say rural Alabama comes out favorably in the comparison.
Regardless of the governmental scheme picked, rural populations have been shrinking, which decreases their political influence. There are several states losing population.
Ultimately, you're going to have to count on the general public's goodwill.
Fun fact: Alabamans are richer than most Western Europeans. But that aside, I’m proposing letting Alabamans govern Alabama and Marylanders govern Maryland. The states wouldn’t subsidize each other or have input into the laws governing each other’s internal politics. Maybe there would be a military coalition like NATO.
To be honest, apart from huffing and puffing, I really find there isn't really any motivation for an actual divide of the country at the end of the day. Also, the divide is often within states, not just amongst the states, just look at California.
Support for secession is 25% nationwide, and 35% in the Southwest: http://blogs.reuters.com/jamesrgaines/2014/09/19/one-in-four.... The national divide exacerbates intrastate divides. Last year in Maryland, Larry Hogan, a Republican, won 28% of the vote in PG county, an urbanized, high-income, predominately black county adjacent to DC. He won 32% of the vote in Baltimore. We fight over stuff like highways versus transit—we’re not paralyzed in this state of affairs where the sides have such divergent values that they regard each other as literally evil.
I would argue reducing federal control is step one. Local governments may want to take more power instead. Take Texas: many cities have become stark-blue due to immigration from south of the border. If they wish to pass certain policies, let them. If the rural areas wish to pass different policies, let them.
America was consciously designed with these divisions in mind. By federalizing the minimum number of things, we reduce the number of things on which we must agree.
> America was consciously designed with these divisions in mind. By federalizing the minimum number of things
If we are going to fetishize the decisions of the architects of the design of our government (which several of them would be appalled by), we should at least understand them: the Constitution (even in its original form, though the subsequent evolution also reflects this) is an embodiment of the idea that the correct amount of federalization at time n+1 may be significantly greater than seemed (and perhaps even was) ideal at time n, rather than the idea that federalization should be aggressively minimized. (Radical minimization of the federal power was the design of the Articles of Confederation and the impetus for the revision effort that produced the Constitution as a fairly strong rejection of that approach.)
> the correct amount of federalization... may be significantly greater than seemed
Wrong. This is why the Constitution enumerates a few, very specific powers and says that the rest are reserved to the states and to the people.
> Radical minimization of the federal power was the design of the Articles of Confederation
Wrong. Congress couldn't even regulate foreign trade; there was no federal power. When the federal government cannot represent the nation as a whole to foreign powers, there is no true federal government. We moved to a Constitution with minimum federal power because that solution didn't work.
If people are so concerned about the so called 'prosperous' blue states subsidizing red states, how about the actual people in the blue states subsidizing policies and people they might not actually agree with?
"If I could add, the other thing that just struck me ... but I'm sorry, California is a rich state, by any measures, the United States is a rich country, and to see these deplorable conditions that the government is allowing, by international human rights standards, it's unacceptable. I'm guided by human rights law."
Those blocks are supposed to be states. The states and population (senate and house) are supposed to both have to agree on something for it to pass congress, which is a high barrier by design, since it affects everyone. You have state governments for things people in a state want.
I mean that’s the folly. People destroyed federalism, devolving all power to the federal government, and now they’re upset that the voting system in the federal government is stacked against them. If they hadn’t made healthcare, for example, a federal issue, folks in Maryland wouldn’t need folks in Alabama to get on board to have “Marylandcare for All.”
Is there anything stopping them from having Marylandcare for All now? The ACA establishes minimums, but does it prevent a state from offering expanded care. My state has their own insurance for pregnant women and children for example.
No, see California. They are considering expanding their state healthcare much further, even to criminal aliens (reported this morning). I don't agree with the policy, but can approve of them trying to avoid forcing the rest of the nation to go along with them. As long as it is legal by their constitution, it's their prerogative.
Hold on. I was with you until you picked this example. How does Maryland run a single-payer system for Marylanders when sick Delawareans can move across the state line to access that care and still commute to their current jobs?
The entire premise of Rayiner's point is that most states won't do the same things, and that states should be encouraged to try different things (the "laboratories of democracy" idea). I buy it, but don't see how health care is a workable example.
States with state income taxes already tax their citizens' income regardless of where it's earned (AFAIK -- the states I've dealt with do, but I'm not familiar with the east coast). Wouldn't that cover it? If residency of Maryland is a requirement for the medical coverage, that would also achieve the tax collection to pay for it.
How does that solve the problem? Live in a low-tax state until your medical risk reaches a threshold, move (perhaps across a nearby state line, as would likely be the case with states like Illinois and Maryland where the major metros are a short drive away from red-state borders) to a higher-tax state when the payoff becomes worth it. Isn't this a textbook adverse selection problem?
I mean that’s definitely part of the problem. Arguably, expansive interpretation of the privileges and immunities clause (as in Saenz v. Roe, which held that a one-year waiting period for drawing on welfare benefits violated the “right to travel” implied by the privileges and immunities clause) is part of the trend of broadly construing federal power and rights to destroy federalism. Narrowly construed, there might be room for say waiting periods to be eligible for state welfare or similar measures that would be sufficient to curb some of that free-riding behavior.
Exactly. This was originally not perceived as quite so "unfair" because the senators were chosen by state legislatures.
But yes, one of the important goals of our Constitution was to prevent "Rule by Virginia" - that is to say, the tyranny of the majority. Today, it would be California and New York vs. Texas and Florida.
It was also less important when the feds did less. Whether you approve or disapprove of the changes, the original system was good, and the tinkering is what broke it. Maybe un-tinkering things should be considered as an option just as much as tinkering them further.
Australia is experiencing the same trend. Quillette has an interesting analysis of the trend - both sides have their own empathy deficits, but when the deficit pits the party against electorally significant populations, losses inevitably follow. This phenomenon exists regardless of whether "electoral significance" stems from direct democracy (popular votes) or republic (electoral college, region-based voting).
Here in Oregon the Democrats are further working to create a divide.
Oregon allows electronic signatures for ballot measures and petitions - which benefits rural areas and marginalized neighborhoods. But the Democrats are going to outlaw this for the next four years.
The reason is to avoid a ballot measure on a new tax increase which the public might not approve.
Having recently left Portland for Seattle, its pretty easy to see how precarious the situation is out here. Oregon seemed to do a better job of keeping "Portland" laws in Portland, whereas Seattle is doing its legal work at the state level and forcing it on down to everyone.
If Oregon isn't careful they'll end up with Portland running the entire state, and the consequences of that are pretty obvious.
The last thing we need is another 2D way of looking at politics. Left/Right Red/Blue Urban/Rural may all be useful* ways of visualizing generalities about data, but without a holistic approach obvious things get missed, and every other person is a corner case. A 2 axis chart is a good start, but even that lacks the nuance to really nail down something as complicated as a multi-tiered federal republics' politics.
Right now there are more layers of bureaucracy between an individual and true political power than ever before. At the same time, the emotional state of those individuals has never been more important to the political class. Using legislation as a weapon against your political enemies based not on principal, but emotional will of your base (or the emotional reaction of your opponents, etc) is likely to end badly for everyone.
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